Founded by Ankit Singhal, Connor Lee, and Vignesh Karthik, Anthrogen plans to decarbonize supply chain and reverse climate change with their technology.
San Francisco-based biotech AI startup Anthrogen closed a $4 million seed round on Tuesday. Part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch, Anthrogen aims to convert carbon dioxide in the air to complex chemicals and fuels with the help of AI-designed enzymes.
The financing was co-led by Regen Ventures and BoxGroup, with participation from Y Combinator, Wayfinder Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, Soma Capital, Ritual Capital, Collaborative Fund, and Pioneer Fund. Angels including Paul Graham, Kulveer Taggar, Todd Goldberg and Rahul Vohra’s Angel Fund also joined the funding round.
Founded by three Columbia University students: CEO Ankit Singhal, COO Vignesh Karthik, and CTO Connor Lee; Anthrogen plans to reverse climate change and decarbonize the supply chains while providing carbon-free alternatives for jet fuel.
“The $4 million will be used to dive deeper on our R&D efforts to create novel enzymes that can capture and turn carbon dioxide into valuable fuels and other molecules like plastic, starches, and cellulose we use everyday,” Singhal told The American Bazaar in a chat interview.
The biotech AI startup launched in 2023 with a different name – Arctic Capture – to “genetically engineer bacteria for carbon capture.” It relaunched early this year as Anthrogen. When asked about the reason behind the rebrand, Singhal wrote: “We rebranded as we felt the direction of the company change from just carbon capture to something more (producing chemicals and shifting supply chains to be inherently carbon negative) and we wanted our public facing image to reflect that.”
Using CRISPR, a gene-altering technology, Anthrogen genetically modifies photosynthetic bacteria to grow quickly using sunlight and carbon dioxide. The startup touts the the fastest known photosynthesizing organism to ever exist on this planet.
READ: Fintech startup Parker raises $20 million in Series B to empower e-commerce businesses (November 11, 2024)
The company has a target of making its fuels and chemicals for 80% of the cost of the fossil fuel equivalent, Singhal said in an interview with Axios.
In 2022, Singhal was named a Science Research Fellow Scholar at Columbia University, where he is majoring in molecular biophysics and applied mathematics.
Lee, the youngest-ever president of Columbia Robotics and a researcher at Columbia’s ROAM Lab, has over a decade of experience in robotics, placing third internationally in the FIRST Robotics Competition and ranking in the top five globally for MATE ROV.
Karthik conducted machine learning and geology research at both the Naval Research Laboratory and Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory within the Earth Institute.
While their LinkedIn profiles suggest the trio is expected to graduate in 2026, Singhal said that all founders have filed for leave from Columbia and are working on the startup full-time.